Historian lifts veil on Civil War cross-dressers

Solent University historian lifts veil on Civil War cross-dressers

MANY women dressed as men to take their place alongside male soldiers in the Civil War, according to new research by a Hampshire historian.

A new study by Profess Mark Stoyle (pictured) of the University of Southampton has investigated claims that the rival armies of King Charles I and Parliament were frequently accompanied by women who dressed in men’s clothing in order to go unnoticed near and on the battlefront.

His findings have been published in The Journal of the Historical Association, History.

Professor Stoyle said: “Historians often claim that it was common for women to cross-dress during the Civil War, but in fact we know very little about this subject. Now I’ve unearthed some compelling pieces of evidence which allow us to explore the practice and what people thought about it at the time.”

The research project scrutinised hundreds of original manuscripts and printed works.

It shows that the reasons for cross-dressing were varied; some women appear to have been motivated by a desire to fight for the cause alongside male soldiers, while others didn’t want to be parted from their husbands and wore men’s clothes so as to travel incognito.

Charles I’s army in particular was accompanied by a number of female camp-followers made up of wives, unmarried partners (harshly referred to as ‘whores’) and prostitutes, some of whom may have dressed as men to be sexually alluring.

The earliest case in the study is mentioned in an anonymous letter written from Charles I’s camp in July 1642. Later published in a pro-royalist news pamphlet, the letter describes a woman called Nan Ball who was ‘taken in mans cloathes, waiting upon her beloved Lieutenant’ while in the king’s army near York. A top level-investigation was launched, the lieutenant was sacked from his command and it was suggested that the woman should be shamed by whipping or pillory.

This wasn’t acted upon and eventually she was simply expelled from the camp after a letter from the king’s young son begged for her reprieve.

A year later, in 1643, a draft proclamation was drawn up, setting out required standards of behaviour for Charles I’s army. It included a hand-written memo in the margin from the king himself stating ‘lett no woman presume to counterfeit her sex by wearing mans apparall under payne of the severest punishment’.

Professor Stoyle says the inclusion of this statement is fascinating: “These words suggest the king believed female cross-dressing was quite widespread in his army and show a willingness on his part to take a much firmer line on the practice – particularly in relation to prostitutes. Curiously though, when the proclamation was finally published it contained no reference to cross-dressing.”

Another example featured in the study reveals an encounter between the parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell, and the mistress of captured royalist Lord Henry Percy – who was dressed in men’s clothes to hide her identity. Cromwell appears to have been amused by this, getting the woman to sing to test his suspicions that the would-be man was a ‘damsel’.

The most detailed account of female cross-dressing during the Civil War comes from a pamphlet of 1645, which details the case of a young foot soldier who spent a year in the parliamentary garrison of Gloucester, but was eventually discovered to be a woman when visiting a tailor whose suspicions were aroused when the soldier ordered a petticoat and waistcoat ‘for my sister’.

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